27-year-old Jason Bell is living out his baseball dream in the Houston Astros organization.

ST. LOUIS (KMOX) - Some players and coaches will go their entire career without experiencing a championship. But 27-year-old manager Jason Bell was able to spray champagne in his very first season in professional baseball.

“It means everything because in the end we’re all competitors, we’re baseball people we like to win.”

At 27-years-old he was youngest manager in Tri-City ValleyCats' history and the second youngest manager in all of minor league baseball, last year. The youngest was the 25-year-old Hudson Valley Renegades' manager Blake Butera, the two even faced each other in July.

Bell led the Houston Astros' New York-Penn League team to a championship and for part of the season was in charge of Houston's No. 1 overall draft pick in 2018, Seth Beer.

He says he only had to pinch himself a couple times throughout the summer.

“I think it’s more about staying in the moment, but sometimes when you’re standing next to Craig Biggio or somebody like that who I grew up idolizing a lot and his style of play. It’s hard to not feel that in a certain way," Bell says.

Bell graduated from Parkway Central High School, then played D-I baseball at Saint Louis University and Central Missouri. Tommy John surgery ended his playing career before graduation, which forced him to really focus on the coaching side of baseball.

So how did Bell find success at such a young age? It all started with his Master's thesis in 2014, which correctly predicted the Astros winning the World Series. He interned with Baseball Info Solutions while in college, which was the main source of baseball analytics for many MLB teams at that time.

During 2013-2014 I️ completed my Master’s by writing 17 pages on why I thought the worst team in MLB will win the WS in a few years #Astrospic.twitter.com/1iY7jOKUkD

That experience, along with the paper, helped get his foot in the door with the Astros.

“I would send that to them and use it as more of an ice breaker," Bell says. "Looking back on the paper now, it’s like I feel like I’ve learned a lot more and not even as proud of the paper as I maybe was.”

He became an expert in the new-age analytics of baseball, knowing he’d have to find a way to be unique to break into the world of professional baseball.

“You have to find a way to stand out and for me, just filling out an application wasn’t going to help me stand out," Bell says. "I had to build something of my own, I had to find something that I believed in and latched on to.”

He says he wanted to keep things loose as manager with the ValleyCats and at the end of year had nothing but appreciation for his guys.

Congratulations, 'Cats fans!! Your support played a huge role in the team's success this year. All of the encouragement for our players went a long way! Here's a special message from 'Cats manager @J_Bell_11! #VamosGatos! pic.twitter.com/ih8Nhe5aam